“Nothing can move like that,” Michaela whispered her awe. She pulled up the visual recorded by the camera, studied the beast closely. Got a really good look at the head with its meter-long, needle-like beak that parted into three jaws, an eye behind each. The body was covered by what looked like pelage rather than scales or skin. It changed from blue to red and then bright yellow as the organism spun and fled. The mobility came from the four wings. They allowed the creature to turn in its own length. To Michaela’s eye, the wings might have been feathered, or rather, some morphological feature that might have served a similar function. She ached to have a sample so that she could work out the physics of how the structures would function in a liquid rather than gaseous medium. What kind of drag would they have? Did they achieve lamellar flow, or maybe serve as compressors to shoot water back as they contracted with each stroke? Or did they function like an anhinga’s wing back on Earth?

“Did you catch the sound?” Casey asked. “How it changed when that thing fled?”

“Yeah. Like it let out a squeal and the background mimicked it. And did you notice? The tubes all disappeared. Like so many things down here, they went invisible. Makes you think that four-winged flyer was a predator.”

“Pretty magical,” Casey said, her voice filled with wonder.

Before Michaela could respond, Jaim’s voice came through com. “We’re done with samples, descending ten meters.”

“Roger that, We’re on station.”

Michaela kept an eye on the monitor as Casey dropped them down, carefully keeping her position ten meters off the other sub’s stern. As they descended, the light began to change, the color seeming to wash out of the tubes as they flicked past the transparency. What had been a light-blue turquoise in the distance had taken on a bluer tint.

“Not so many hits on the sonar,” Michaela noted. “And the background singing is deeper, as if the higher frequency creatures are getting fewer.”

“Yeah, but look at this. Appearing just on our right as we descend.”

Michaela watched a thick spear of something lance up beside the sub’s transparency. As they dropped past the organism, arms that had been folded close to the central trunk detached, reaching out with remarkable dexterity; the ends seemed to explode with wispy fingers that stroked along the transparency’s glass surface.

“Ten meters,” Casey announced. “Neutral buoyancy. Holding steady.”